The AI of Dating

Welcome to my world of wander, where my curiosity brings me to less ventured places.

From the title of this post, you might think it’s about technology or maybe science fiction. Well I promise it isn’t really complex. Let me clarify that ‘AI’ stands for Attraction Inequality. So does it sound interesting enough? If yes, please read on 🙂

I have been thinking about how our looks shape our behaviour. How can we answer the question to. ‘How attractive are we?’
I do have a simple theory. The answer is based on how other people in the society rate us, and our personal take on our own looks is irrelevant.
Why? Imagine you’re the only male or female left in the world, how attractive would you perceive yourself to be? It doesn’t matter because we would be the most & least attractive person at the same time.

Let’s return to the topic of discussion. In our advance world of technology, we can answer a lot of questions such as our level of attractiveness. One way to find out is by creating a profile on a dating app.
That’s what I did. Although there are plenty of research out there, I decided to embark on this adventure first hand.
I created two profiles .

1. my own pictures with a ‘COOL’ description.
2. a Caucasian male and a very similar description as above.

For both profiles, I swiped actively for about 48hours & recorded the results. To ensure that the results are not biased, I swiped based on my own ‘preferences & taste’ for both profiles.
As an asian Male in the first profile, I obtained a few matches and  there were about 5 people (indicated in the golden circle)who already ‘liked’ me.
For the 2nd profile, take a deep breath and look below….

~I wonder what ‘he’ did to attract so many girls 😉 ~

From the research I found online & the social experiment using the app,
the ranking of the “attraction food chain” are as follows:

1. Caucasian Male
2. Asian Female
3. Caucasian Female
4. Asian Male

The ranking is based on a simple experiment with the perfect conditions mentioned in the next paragraph.

Let’s put 200 heterosexual people in a dating app with an equal ratio of the following variables:

• Male:Female
• Asian:Caucasian

& a good mixture of height/weight/attractiveness/education background.

Each person would be exposed to 100 people of the opposite sex.

To generalize things, let’s have 3 different measures & assign points to them:

1. ALL(at least 90%) : 3 points
2. MOST(at least 50%) : 2 points
3. SOME (less than 50%) : 1 point

• Caucasian males are desired by females of ALL Caucasians & ALL Asians.
• Caucasian females are desired by males of ALL Caucasians & MOST Asians.
• Asian females are desired by males of MOST Caucasians & ALL Asians.
• Asian males are desired by females of SOME Caucasians & MOST Asians.

We can represent this using a ratio of people you desire vs people who desire you. To put it simply, it is the the ratio of the number of People(Who desire you : You desire)

The higher the ratio, the better position a person is in.

Caucasian Male(CM) =  6:5

Asian Female(AF) =  5:5

Caucasian Female(CF) = 5:4 

Asian Male(AM) = 3:5

This ratio is just a generalisation & doesn’t apply to everyone. Just like the measure of a median height. Most people will either be more or less than the median height. So there will be definitely Asian males who only prefer Asian females & vice versa so their ratio becomes different.

Ultimately, attraction inequality is always present and to be aware of the “game” is crucial. Everyone would prefer another person of equal or “higher” ranking in terms of looks.

It’s an easy game for the superior looking people(Caucasians) and harder for average people(Asians). Not all Caucasians are better looking than all Asians, but the median looking caucasian male will definitely win against the median Asian male just in terms of looks

With all this information, we know that the dating game will be skewed based on looks. So spend your time wisely. Being an Asian male in this game is like playing chess but you’re the only one blindfolded. However, there will be people who can still win despite the disadvantages. There’s other games that are not as biased as this one. So choose them wisely. There’s no achievement when you flaunt what you didn’t earn. Just ask yourself this simple question: Would you root for the blindfolded guy to win the game?
So if you are a highly capable & successful Asian male with average looks, you probably want to skip the app because you’ll just be a diamond left undiscovered thanks to AI 😉 Besides, there are plenty of decent people out there without dating app profiles.

To conclude, I would like to thank you for reading and coming this far. Remember that the ovarian lottery is a natural phenomena and there should not be any discrimination towards any group as none of us gets to choose our looks & ethnicity. It is similar to being born into a wealthy family & reaping all the benefits. With that being said, never be discouraged by your own body/looks/attractiveness because there are plenty of other ways to succeed in life.

I will end the post with an excerpt from an article found online regarding
‘Attraction Inequality’

There are no villains in this story. Nobody can or should be blamed for his or her honest preferences, and if women collectively believe that most men are unattractive, what grounds does anyone, male or female, have to argue with them? We may pity the large majority of men who are regarded as unattractive and who have few or no romantic experiences while a small percentage of attractive men have many. Just as much, consider that we live in a monogamous culture, and so the 20 percent of men who are regarded as attractive can only be in committed relationships with at most 20 percent of women. We may just as well pity the rest of the women, who are destined to be in committed relationships, if they pursue a relationship at all, with someone who they regard as unattractive. The only villain in this story is nature, which has molded our preferences so that this tragic mismatch of attraction and availability occurs.

Read more at the link below:
https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/